


Eyes to the Sky

by eugyne (AreteNike)



Series: The Law of Gravity [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Altean Lance (Voltron), Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Grief/Mourning, and shiro too, keith and lance are brothers au, keith is a good boy who loves his brother dammit, not s6 (or s5) compliant, they are half alien and their parents are qpps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-24 18:28:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14959838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AreteNike/pseuds/eugyne
Summary: Keith has his brother, and that's enough.





	Eyes to the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> happy fathers day to mark kogane, even tho this fic isnt rlly about him--but the one i posted about him was on keiths bday so??? close enough
> 
> if youre reading this as part of The Law of Gravity, it can be read in any order with the others. if youre reading as part of Brothers in Arms, this and Feet on the Ground can be read in any order, but it will otherwise be chronological (i anticipate a third part... eventually).

As long as Keith can remember, Lance has been there.

He knows it wasn't always that way—their parents have never tried to convince them they're brothers by blood. But Keith doesn't remember his mom and Lance doesn't remember his dad and as far as Keith is concerned, Lance has  _ always _ been there. They're family.

It's not all the same, for them; he doesn't remember living in the shack out in the desert, but it's familiar in a way Lance claims he doesn't feel. But the old apartment they both remember to some extent; they all had to share one bathroom and one of the first clear memories Keith has was when Lance was sick and throwing up in the toilet and Keith had to pee so badly he cried.

It's not very good, as far as first memories go, so he usually says something about playing with Lance out in the desert whenever the topic comes up.

Either way, Lance is there. His twin in every aspect that matters; inseparable, through school and beyond, to the Garrison, to the sky. Lance has always been better at making friends, and Keith has always been better at studying, and they share what they can and Keith has always been okay with that. He thought Lance was, too.

But he catches Lance talking to his roommate—Harry or Hank or something—in some Garrison hallway one day, and hears his name.

"I just can't believe he managed to catch  _ Shiro's _ attention, of all people, y'know?  _ Shiro! _ " he's saying. "It's like, I'm proud of him, but I also wanna punch him in the face."

Around the corner, Keith recoils. He always thought Lance would be the only person who'd never hurt him. Lance and Mom and Dad.

"That's kinda harsh, dude," says Harry/Hank/Whatever.

"I know, but it's just... ugh. I thought  _ here _ at least I could get out of my  _ little brother's _ shadow."

Keith's heart drops.

"He's always been the smart one." Lance is audibly pouting. "You don't get awards for being a social butterfly after like, kindergarten. We're both here to be pilots and he's better at it, so what's  _ my _ thing, y'know?"

Keith walks away.

He knows he could just introduce Lance to Shiro. They'd get along—they're both the kinds of people that can befriend anyone, when they want to. And Lance is never 100% serious when he whines.

But Keith has never had a friend he didn't meet through Lance. He decides Lance can find "his thing" on his own, whatever that might be.

Keith wants someone to be his, just his, for once.

And he has that, for a time. And Lance never acts differently, never says anything about Shiro at all—but Keith can't forget what he overheard, and can't help but wonder, through every shared meal and class and study session, if Lance resents him for it.

Then the Kerberos mission launches and Keith is left with Lance and his friends again, just like they used to be. For a while, everything is back to normal, except for the restlessness he can't shake. Knowing Shiro is up there somewhere keeps drawing his eyes to the sky, keeps him wondering. 

Then the Kerberos mission is lost.

Keith locks himself in his room, answers only for Lance and even then he doesn't open the door. He calls Dad but he can't think of what to say. What is there to say?

"Sometimes people go up and never come back down," is what Dad says, soft and hoarse. "Gravity ain't enough."

In any other situation, Keith would wonder. But Shiro is gone.

"What do I do?" he whispers.

"Whatever ya can," Dad says. "I used t' think the worst thing about death was the hole they leave behind."

Keith waits.

"It ain't. It's the way things keep goin' when your whole world has stopped. Ya feel like life oughta stop too, but then the sun still rises." Dad pauses, long enough for Keith to think he's finished his thought, but then he continues.

"Ya gotta keep rising too, kiddo. Life can leave ya behind if you're not careful."

In this moment, the last thing Keith wants to do is anything at all.

"It's hard," he says.

"I know it is," Dad says. "But I'm here. I'll always be here."

Mom calls, later, but Keith doesn't want to talk about it anymore—doesn't want to think about it anymore. She fills the silence the same way Lance does, talking about nothing in particular, lulling him into a state that's not quite sleep.

"I'm proud of you," she says finally. "And I love you."

"Thanks," he whispers back. "I love you, too."

When the call ends, Keith gets out of bed. It's late now, after curfew, but he unlocks his door and leaves his room, walks down the hall. Knocks on Lance's door.

"It's unlocked," comes a sleepy call from within.

When they were younger and one or the other of them had a nightmare, they'd climb into the other's bed. It happened less often as they grew older—and it became harder to fit the both of them in one small bed—but it still happened. The night before they left home Lance had shuffled over the three feet between their beds and climbed into Keith's, head at Keith's feet, and Keith had slept with Lance's heels digging into his shoulder blades and known that no matter what happened at the Garrison, his brother would be with him.

Now, Keith slips into the room Lance shares with that Hank guy, and climbs into his bed and lies down with his head at Lance's feet. Lance digs his heels reassuringly into Keith's back and doesn't say anything, because he knows. If there's resentment, it's hidden well away, too deep for Keith to feel in the boy he knows best. 

In the morning, Lance and Hunk—his name is Hunk, Keith is pretty sure—go to class, and Keith stays in Lance's bed and stares at the ceiling until they return in the afternoon. Hunk offers him a sandwich.

"Iverson asked where you were," Lance says as Keith eats mindlessly. "I covered for you."

"Thanks," Keith tries to say, but his voice won't cooperate and it comes out as barely a whisper. Lance just leans into his side and chatters about his classes, his friends, the crumbs Keith is leaving on his sheets, filling the silence with his words. Bringing Keith back to himself. Grounding him. 

The sun will rise again, and Keith has to rise with it. 

He goes back to his own room that night, but Lance follows, somehow knowing he still needs him. 

The first class is hard. Keith is present physically but emotionally he's 4.67 billion miles away. The next class he snaps at a classmate who asks if he's okay. The third class he snaps at the teacher. 

He spends his fourth class in Iverson's office. He's being reprimanded, probably, but he doesn't listen.

"You're the most talented pilot in your class," are the words that penetrate the haze. "Don't throw it away."

He looks up, meets the eye glaring into his own. 

"So was Shiro," he says, and walks out. His arm is grabbed but he shrugs it off. 

The next day is the same, and so is the one after. Keith wonders, distantly, whether they will break before he does—whether he will be expelled before he finds it in himself to care. 

He spends the weekend in Lance's bed. Lance carries on with his life and Keith wishes for a single bitter moment that he'd introduced Lance and Shiro after all, so he wouldn't have to be the only one unraveling. 

Then again, he can't imagine Lance unraveling. Lance is like Mom, woven tight. Reliable. 

In a few days they expel him, and he doesn't care. His bags are already packed; he knows where Shiro kept the spare key to his hoverbike so he takes it and leaves for the shack in the desert. His phone buzzes but he doesn't answer. This is where he needs to be, he feels; out in the middle of a quiet nowhere, alone. 

The shack is small and empty, and Keith climbs onto the roof first thing and watches the sky as it fades from dusk to night. If he ignores the wind, the occasional wisp of cloud, the hot metal of the roof digging into his back, he can almost imagine he's lost up in space, too. 

It's not until the heat of the roof is no longer enough to keep him warm that he climbs down and checks his phone. 

"Are you safe?" asks a text from Mom, on top of twenty missed calls from Lance. He looks out into the darkness and has a sudden, strange desire to  _ go, _ to  _ search. _ To wander out into the desert and never come back. 

He texts back, "I'm safe," and goes inside. He lies down on the sofa and it all bubbles up at once, leaving him choking and sobbing into the dusty cushions until he can't anymore.

Shiro is gone, and he isn't coming back. The only friend Keith has ever made has left him. 

His fault, he supposes, for letting his heart latch onto someone temporary. 

Dad comes by in the morning. Keith hears him drive up but he doesn't move as the door opens and he comes to the couch. He curls up further to make room, and Dad's hand sinks into his hair.

He has so many thoughts, so many things to say—too many. He doesn't know how to say them.

"They're liars," he says eventually. "I couldn't stay there anymore." He hadn't realized he'd been planning to leave anyway, but now that he says it—yes. He was.

"That's fine," says Dad, because Dad is supportive. Dad doesn't push, doesn't question. Mostly.

So Keith adds, "There's something out here. I can feel it."

Dad's hand stops moving for half a second. "Like what?" he asks.

"Dunno," Keith mumbles, because he doesn't. It's just a pull in his chest, leading out into the desert somewhere, and he doesn't know if it's real or not. He's been so restless anyway. "But I want to find it."

Dad is quiet a moment, but his hand keeps running through Keith's hair, slow and steady.

"You do what you need t'do, Keith," he says finally. "Just call your brother, and come home for dinner."

Shit. Lance is probably worried sick. Keith heaves a sigh and sits up slowly, digging his phone out of his pocket. 

It's dead, of course. His charger is in one of his bags, he's not sure which one. He didn't start the generator last night and the solar's been broken for years, so there's no power, anyway. He's not sure if there's any gas, either. 

He drops his head into his hands. He can't bring Shiro back, he can't stay in school, he can't keep in touch with his own brother. He can't even charge his fucking phone. 

"Borrow mine," says Dad, handing over his stupid little decade-old flip phone. He takes Keith's phone and gets up, starts rummaging through Keith's bags. 

Keith looks at the phone in his hands, and decides to take a walk. 

He knows Lance's number by heart, but he takes the time as he walks to get to the address book, to scroll through Dad's handful of contacts slowly. Mostly, they're just names; even Mom is only listed simply as "Mirana." But there's one entry labeled "Little Prince" and another that says "My Son and Moon." His and Lance's names are nowhere to be found. 

Keith selects "My Son and Moon" first and finds his own number there. He can picture Dad grinning to himself at that dumb little pun every time he calls, as vivid as if he had seen it for real—finds himself smiling just slightly at the thought. 

He backs out of the entry and goes to "Little Prince" instead, and sure enough, it's Lance's number. He never knew Dad had these private little nicknames for them; he can't remember him calling either of them these names. Such an odd thing to keep secret. Maybe he was embarrassed. 

But Keith has never once doubted their father loves them.

He presses the call button and waits. Lance picks up halfway through the first ring. 

"Dad! Are you with Keith?" he says immediately. 

"Um. It's me," says Keith. "My phone's dead so I borrowed Dad's."

"Keith!" Lance all but shrieks his name. "Shit! Are you okay?! Holy fuck, Keith, where have you been, why didn't you answer my calls?!"

"...My phone's dead," Keith repeats numbly, and then remembers the 20 missed calls last night. "I'm sorry. I just... needed space." In more ways than one, maybe. He looks up at the cloudless sky where the stars are hidden in blue. 

Lance is quiet for a moment. Then: "Are you coming back?"

"They expelled me."

"Oh." Another pause. "Oh man. That fucking sucks."

"It's okay," Keith all but whispers. "I didn't want to be there anymore anyway. Not... like this." Not without Shiro.

"It won't be the same without you." Lance's voice is more than sad—it's regretful, like he could've done anything about this. But he couldn't. Keith could have, but he didn't, he didn't think about what this would do to Lance, so fucking caught up in his own grief.

"I'm sorry," he says again, desperately, voice cracking, and he hears an intake of breath on the other end.

"Keith, it's okay. Okay? You have every right to be in mourning and Iverson is an asshole. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine. Just... Just call me sometimes, okay?"

"Okay," he says. "Okay. I will."

When Keith gets back to the shack, the generator is running and his phone is on the charger. Dad looks up as he enters.

"Better?" he asks.

"Yeah," says Keith, and hands back the phone.

He goes home for dinner, but he stays the night in the shack—and the next, and the next. It takes him two weeks to unpack, and even then it's more that he uses up what was in the bags than makes an actual effort to empty them. 

He goes home again for dinner, and also laundry. 

The days he can only spend lying on the sofa are growing less frequent, and he takes to exploring the desert with Shiro's hoverbike instead. The pull in his chest stays, and grows stronger in some places, which convinces him more than anything that there's  _ something _ out there. Something real. 

He starts drawing maps, taking pictures. He snags an old corkboard from the Garrison dump and hangs it up so he can pin everything up and stop spilling coffee on his notes. 

The shack has a pile of dusty old equipment that Dad never explained, too, but when he turns it on and finds he can feel the energy spikes the screens and dials show, he gets an inkling, maybe, of why Dad let him stay. This stuff could have been his, but Keith has a feeling that it isn't. That this equipment, this feeling, came from his mother. Not Mom, but the one who bore him, the one Dad never talks about. 

He should ask about it, he supposes, but when he goes home for dinner and Dad watches him with his sad eyes he always loses his nerve. 

He's not sure he could ever explain how he knows there's something coming. The readings fluctuate like they never have before and it's a feeling in his stomach, in his head. He knows better than to discount it, though, so he prepares. Whatever is coming, he figures, the Garrison will want it, and if the Garrison gets it he'll never get answers. 

He watches the sky and doesn't even question why he knows that's where it's coming from. He just knows it will come, and he has to be  _ ready. _

When it comes, bright and burning, the Garrison gets there first. So, naturally, Keith does what anyone with a feeling in his gut and a deep and painful desperation would do. 

He steals it back. 

And then the "it" is Shiro and that's a shock on its own—and how'd he  _ know, _ still—but then Lance and Hunk and some kid that looks like Matt are there too and he's going at full speed, out of the portable lab, onto the bike, off the cliff, away, away. 

He sets Shiro down on the bed he hardly ever uses, with Hunk's help, and breathes for what feels like the first time in a year. Then he goes out and all but collapses on the porch and he doesn't know what to do. 

"Hey," Lance says, and he comes and sits on the edge of the porch too. "Uh, nice to see you again."

"I knew he was coming," Keith responds. "I don't know how, but I knew."

"Maybe he's like, your soulmate."

Keith snorts. "No," he says. "It's something else."

Lance, because he's Lance, can't leave it at that. "Like what?"

"Dunno. I think..." Keith shrugs helplessly. "I think it has to do with my mother. I don't know. I think all that stuff in the shack was hers."

Lance perks up. "You got it working?"

"Yeah."

He leans in, quieter. "Did you ask Dad about any of it?"

Keith sighs. "No. I couldn't."

Lance hums. "I'd ask why, but... I don't think I could ask Mom about my father, either. They just..."

"Don't talk about it," Keith says. "Yeah."

They both look to the night sky.

"What do we do now?" Lance asks.

"It's not too late for you to go back, you know," says Keith. "They probably couldn't tell who was out there. You can still be a fighter pilot."

"Nah," says Lance, easier than Keith expected. "Now that I know aliens are real or whatever? No way. Besides, you're right, the Garrison are liars. I mean, Shiro came back." He looks over at Keith. "How're you holding up? Because, y'know. Shiro."

Keith takes a deep breath, and lets it out shakily. 

"I'm glad he's back," he says, and manages not to choke on it. "But I don't know what it means."

"Besides that aliens are real?"

"Yeah. Besides that." Keith shrugs helplessly. "What do we do about it?"

"Sleep on it?" Lance suggests. "I mean, it's gotta be two in the morning by now. And then in the morning you can tell us about all that stuff on your corkboard."

That's something. Keith has been understandably distracted tonight, but the pull is still there—stronger than ever now that he's focusing on it. Whatever was calling to him is still out there, waiting. Shiro's return was related, he's sure, but it isn't over yet.

"Yeah," he says eventually. "Okay."

There is one extra blanket and one extra pillow, so they let the Matt-looking kid—Pidge, he says his name is, but Keith vaguely remembers Matt mentioning having a little sister and he has his suspicions—take the blanket and the sofa. Hunk gets the pillow, and Lance uses his shoulder as a pillow, and Keith uses Lance's shoulder as a pillow, the three of them curled together on the floor for warmth. 

It should be uncomfortable, but Lance is here—and Hunk is familiar enough, and Pidge is sort of secondhand familiar, and  _ Shiro _ is just a doorway away. So he sleeps.

The light of morning doesn't bring answers; Shiro doesn't remember what happened to him, which, Keith decides, really figures. But he's here and that's more than Keith dared hope for. 

"It's good to have you back," he says. 

"It's good to be back," Shiro says, and something in Keith's stomach untwists the way it does when he calls Lance after a long time apart, or when he walks in the front door back home to have dinner with Mom and Dad. Like Shiro is family, too. 

He knows his family will never leave him, so—maybe he is.

Shiro can't explain much, and Keith can't explain much more; they both share with the rest what little they know, and then Hunk builds them some gadget and they're off, searching for what Keith has been searching for and maybe finally going to find it.

"Fuck," Lance says loudly over the sound of the bike. "Mom and Dad."

"Call them!" Keith shouts.

"I am!" Lance shouts back. And, less than a minute later, "Mom! Dad! I'm with Keith, Shiro came back last night."

There's only a short pause.

"Yeah! Keith says we're gonna go find what he's been looking for. But there's something weird going on with the Garrison."

They haven't seen any sign of the Garrison yet this morning, but Keith doesn't doubt they're still searching. And their treatment of Shiro... something doesn't quite add up. A problem for another day, he decides. 

"We will!" Lance shouts. "Love you, Dad! Mom!"

"Me too!" Keith adds, knowing they probably won't hear. Then they dip down into a canyon and Lance only shouts, "Bye!" before going quiet again. His hand clings tight to Keith's shoulder.

The cave they find is filled with markings that glow when Lance touches them—and then they find a  _ lion, _ a piece of Voltron that awakens just for him. And Keith watches the great metal beast bow its head to his brother and remembers, with startling clarity, Lance's words from over a year ago:  _ I'm proud of him, but I also wanna punch him in the face. _

Maybe that's what this feeling is, Keith thinks, as they leap into the sky. He spent a year searching for something that called to him only to find it wanted his brother instead.

But does he resent him for it? No, not really. Not for more than a fleeting moment. He's his brother—there is nothing that can come between them, nothing in all the universe. 

Besides, there are four other lions out there somewhere.

**Author's Note:**

> come yell w me on tumblr @ [maternalcube](http://maternalcube.tumblr.com/)


End file.
